The brains behind the Boeing plant conversion–from aerospace manufacturing to film production, from airplanes to Airplane!–is Jack O’Halloran, a former boxer and actor (that was him, as Non, in Superman II). We met Jack at Boeing this morning, under a kind of Palm Springs sun, impossibly bright light bouncing off the 75 or so acres of concrete and asphalt, the whiter-than-white Boeing buildings.

He wanted to add to stories in the Times and P-T his assertion that the project will turn Long Beach into a capital of filmmaking.

* He figures he’ll build “the most advanced digital studio in the world.” What he envisions isn’t just a traditional film studio, he says, but one that’ll bring the latest technology to film (3-D) and computer game production, including motion-capture stages. That, he says several times–the computer games, the 3-D technology–is the future of an industry that is in danger of being moved permanently from the movie theater to a living room near you.

* His studio brings Long Beach “full circle in the film business. It’s not a well-known fact that in 1918, there were 200 sound stages in Long Beach.” He names a long list of people who lived in the city, only one of which I recognize (Fatty Arbuckle), all of them and their studios driven from the city after the discovery of oil. “Oil was worth more than film,” he says. The filmmakers settled in Hollywood. And now they’re back. “Look at a map of LA and just try to find a place where you can drop a 75-acre project with these facilities”–he says this while waving his arm at four nearby buildings (it’s a massive arm; guy was a rated heavyweight boxer and has a jaw like the grill on a train). He says it was love at first sight, him and this place: “When I walked onto this site for the first time, they [Boeing] told me it wasn’t for sale. I said, ‘It is now.’”

“You’ve got a million square feet under roof here. Five freeways. Eighty acres. Inside there”–the biggest of the buildings–”we’ve got an unused 30-ton crane.” Because it was built to produce high-end aircraft, the site is perfect for the production of films–which require environmental controls over light, noise, dust and vibrations. That will cut costly delays in production.

* Jack is connected. He’s friends with the governor (calls him “Arnie”). “We’re in an enterprise zone,” so taxes are low; he says the state will soon make public the exact nature of the low taxes. And while some others in the city struggle to find their way through the maze at City Hall, Jack had the mayor as his guide. It was indeed the mayor who (Jack says) advised him to stay away from the Queen Mary–”too many hassles down there with Coastal Commission and others.” “The City, and especially the mayor, have been brilliant,” he says. He says the city helped him rezone the massive property in a single week.

* He asks me twice to mention how much he admires Cal State Long Beach’s film department (hello to Craig Smith) and the folks at LB City College, who are his back neighbors.

* Says he’s committed to green stuff–will run solar panels across the tops of buildings and LED lights inside. “LEDs produce 80 percent of the heat of a standard light,” he says–imagine a boxer using the language of an engineer, but really sincere. “That reduced heat means reduced air conditioning.” He says most days 1000 studio employees will be able to walk to their jobs; that’ll keep a lid on traffic.

* This is no long-term vision. “We’ll have the first cameras rolling down here in oh-nine,” he says. Construction will be mostly complete a year after that. He says Marvel will bring its production to Long Beach.

* He is positively effusive on job creation. “This city has lost like 40,000 industrial jobs,” he says. He figures the studio will produce 25,000 new jobs.

“People thought I was nuts when I came down here,” he says. “I said, ‘Watch and see.’”

Tags: aerospace, bob foster, Boeing, California, conversion, District Weekly, fatty arbuckle, film production, film studio, hollywood, jack o'halloran, Long Beach, marvel comics, mayor, Queen Mary, superman